Hard Cores

I've been out a few times in the past weeks trying to collect and cross date pine and juniper cores from the Book Cliffs.  Well.  I've fallen into a pattern of failure.  A couple of times I couldn't get the increment borer into the tree and a couple of other times the borer became so packed with pitchy bark that it was completely plugged.  Finally, when I did get a pair of cores, I couldn't cross date them:  Not even with each other!  So, now I have started from scratch.  After a thorough increment borer cleaning, I selected a discrete stand of relatively small diameter Douglas fir trees and I am working through a complete inventory.  Douglas fir is the classic species for dating and cross dating because it is very sensitive to climate signals.  Plus, I have two local master chronologies from the Book Cliffs to help me get it straight.  I'm just going to keep working on it until the whole hillside is cross dated.  Damnit!

Canyon Hopping

We had Monday off.  VSO needed to visit the Green River Canyon between Swasey's and Nefertiti, so I drove her there.  While she worked, I made pictures of the river.  It was a beautiful day.  After that, we went to Sego Canyon to look at the rock art:  Another nice panel.

One Inch

While the statewide snow totals have bumped up in the past couple of weeks, it has been very dry in Carbon County.  When I went out on Friday afternoon (above) it was snowing lightly and I though it might add up.  But, it didn't.  This morning (Sunday) we awoke to new snow in town.  One inch of snow.  I think it is the deepest single snowfall at the house this winter.

Birthday Wish

You know you are a rock-art-nerd when your birthday wish is to spend the special day rock art hunting.  Yesterday, we went to Ferron Canyon so VSO could search for glyphs.  There are supposed to be some pictographs in the canyon, too, so I suppose we were searching for those, but we found only petroglyphs.  The one below is in the book—I started calling it the "wagon panel"—but we didn't find it until the end of the day.  Once you know where to look it seems obvious, but there are a lot of rocks out there.

Three Days in the Field

We spent the last three days in the backcountry, but I left myself no time for posting each day.  To summarize:  On Friday, we drove out to Bull Point and found our way to the main stem of Robbers Roost Canyon.  There was a huge pictograph panel at that location.  We walked downstream to the confluence with the Dirty Devil River, explored briefly into the South Fork of RRC, and then climbed out (above).

On Saturday, we drove 15 or 20 miles up the Flint Trail and parked along one of the fingers of Rock Canyon.  We tried to hike in the bottom of the canyon, but it was very steep and we finally encountered an insurmountable pour-over.

On Sunday, EDO went out with her friend Max, while VSO and I made it to Cowboy Cave.  The cave is a famous Utah archaeologic site where the late Jesse Jennings excavated through 11,000 years of material that had accumulated on the cave floor.  Along with lots of animal dung, he and his team found Engelmann spruce leaves at the bottom of the dig!  A reason for me to visit.  The last picture (below) was made at the view area overlooking Hite at sunset.